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Crowd counts for right-wing events combine two of the right's favorite passtimes: quickly spreading lies over the internet and then demanding that any evidence they're lying is liberal bias. Case in point: Glenn Beck holds massive self-promotional event at the Lincoln Memorial. Random internet monkeys claim a million people were there. People who know what they're talking about say it's a tenth of that. Wingers throw tantrum.

Oh, right, so I guess it's three of the right's favorite passtimes.

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Has David Vitter been pressuring newspapers in Louisiana to take it easy on Brent Furer, a former aide who attacked his girlfriend with a knife, but got to keep his job for two years anyhow?

According to two editors in Louisiana, the answer is yes.

"Senator Vitter's attorney sent us a letter taking issue with the way we worded one particular sentence...about Mr. Furer's difficulty," says Carl Redman, executive editor of The Advocate.

...

The letter from Vitter's counsel threatened no legal action, and The Advocate responded. According to Redman, The Advocate's counsel informed Vitter "we're exercising our First Amendment freedoms...we agree that the sentence that he pointed to was inartfully crafted, there was nothing untrue about it and that we would continue to report on Mr. Vitter and his campaign."

The Monroe News Star had a similar experience several weeks ago.

"We had a local article that referenced it and did not have an updated thing on what the final disposition of the case was," says Ken Stickney, the News Star's managing editor. "They wanted us to send them copies of the article...anything we'd ever written about the fella."

Okay, let's parse this one for a second.

Four out of ten Republicans currently believe the President of the United States isn't an American citizen. Double-digit percentages believe he is going to impose Sharia Law on the United States, that he has convinced the Senate to create "death panels" in our health care system and that he may just be a Communist. This is all based on, at best, absoultely nothing and at worst evidence that completely refutes these claims.

Senator Vitter, on the other hand, has been proven to have consorted with prostitutes, which for all the arguments about your opinion of such act, is actually illegal. He hired, and then covered up the hiring, of someone who also committed a crime, and a violent one at that. He is going to win re-election by double digits.

Dear Louisiana voters: here's a piece of foil. It's shiny.

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This was one of those great little stories that got pushed aside because Muslims were taking up all the airwaves trying to be people. A 22-year-old kid figured out Sarah Palin's email password on Yahoo because all the "security" questions could be found via a... well, via a quick search on Yahoo. Oh, also, Palin was using a Yahoo email account instead of government-operated computer systems so her emails wouldn't be public record. Not that it was illegal for her to do that or anything, except in every single case where it was, which was all of them.

So, for those of you keeping score, a 22-year-old is probably going to go to jail because the former half-term governor of Alaska broke the law. Great things are coming to this country.

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The irony of Gibbs' moronic "professional left" comment the other week is that there actually is a "professional left" and they're really important in helping Democrats get elected. The problem is, when there are less of them being professional, they have less time to be left.

I'll try to say that in a less cutesy way now, and using real-life experience: I worked for two separate left-leaning organizations for over four years. I left DC in 2008 before Obama was elected, and after the election, even in the terrible economy, it appears to have been a good move, job-wise. Why? Because once Obama won the election, people stopped caring about supporting left-leaning organizations. Donations dropped. Campaigns dwindled. People assumed they had done their job and were ready to harvest the fruits of their labors. That... yeah, that didn't turn out exactly as they hoped. This is where the "sensible" people start explaining how everything these hundreds of thousands of people think is merely an illusion and a conspiracy launched by angry bloggers because that is both helpful and will change everything. But I digress.

Now, combine this with the fact that jobs are in the toilet right now (the major point Atrios keeps making) and you have a perfect storm of why this isn't 2008 anymore. The people who would normally be out there pushing hard for Democrats to win are 1. unmotivated simply to work hard for a campaign and 2. far more interested in getting a damn job. The right used to joke all the time that anti-war activists and Obama supporters were just "lazy kids with trust funds" and "stupid college students on their parents' money" and well, guess what, that's a lot of the base and now they're not out there volunteering and campaigning because what they really need is rent money.

There is no type of email nor any measurable level of yelling that can be made to the so-called "professional left" to convince them to clap harder. I'm at the point where I truly think the Obama team honestly had no idea the economy was going to collapse like this, and they had absolutely no plan (or motivation) to deal with the Tea Party and the total Republican opposition in the Senate. Their strategy was, quite literally, to hope that the 90-year-old and the dude with terminal brain cancer didn't die for two years.

And that is not just disappointing to the "professional left" but outright insulting, because I can see how many of them feel like they tried harder two years ago then the effing president is doing right now.

What I also remember were the snotty segments from pundits like Bill O'Reilly that mocked people like, say, Jeneanne Garofalo for saying at the onset of war stupid, hippie ideas like "we're going to get stuck in an insurgency" and "we could end up being there for years" and "there aren't any WMDs" and other nonsense that explain why Air America is bankrupt and O'Reilly makes millions still. And to be honest, it's one of the reasons I've had a harder time blogging and writing and cartooning these last two years than any other time in my life.

I don't tend to delve into the personal much on this site and I'm not really going to now, but sufficed to say while there are a lot of people out there worsr off than me, things could also be a lot better. Things were a lot better only a few years ago. I'm starting to compile the last two years of material for my next book now, and looking at the optimism from only two years ago against what's happening now is... well... depressing as hell.

I want so hard to believe in Conan O'Brien's departing message that great things will happen if you're just not cynical and are kind to people and work hard and everything in politics right now just fights that idea. Megan McArdle, seven years later, makes more money than I'll ever see in my life, despite making mistakes that would get me fired from my job if I made them on that level. Pam Gellar and Glenn Beck, who have spent the last few years doing nothing but promoting abject racism, have TV shows and hundred-thousand-dollar book deals. Sarah Palin exists.

I don't know how long this current political (and emotional) climate will last, I really don't. But in the midst of all the people who keep telling me to stop whining and complaining, I really wish there were more coherent explanations as to why. Because it looks like the bad guys all won right now.

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Most right-wingers never heard of Saul Alinsky before Barack Obama got elected. Then one right-wing commenter (probably Glenn Beck) made a reference to him, and every right-winger who wanted to sound educated on his work started repeating it. I meant what I said in this week's strip; I really believe they think they sound smarter when they do this.

The only thing funnier in this vein is when the wingers don't do their research, as exemplified in the final panel. Not only is the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii real, that argument was actually made a few weeks ago by a troll who couldn't be bothered to check Google first.

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Also, I've got to get started on my next book myself. As I mentioned earlier, the tentative title is "You're Still An Asshole For Voting For Nader," but I'm open to suggestions over the next month or so of layout and printing. Feel free to email or Tweet any suggestions about your favorite articles, blog posts, etc. There's definitely going to be a lot of stuff about the 2008 election in there.

But back to non-self-promotion. Go buy a copy of War Is Boring right now. When I got the copy I thought I was going to wait until the weekend to read it. Instead I sat down and ended up reading the entire thing before I even changed out of my work clothes. It's awesome.

William Shatner, of all people, stands at the center of television's latest moral battleground.

He's the cantankerous lead character in a new CBS sitcom, "(Bleep) My Dad Says," that is scheduled to air on Thursday nights. Rather than "bleep," the title uses a series of symbols that suggest the expletive included in the book title on which the series is based.

The Parents Television Council last week sent letters to 340 companies that advertise frequently on TV urging them to stay away from the show unless the name is changed. The group argues that the title is indecent.

"Parents really do care about profanity when their kids are watching TV," said PTC President Tim Winter. "All parents? No, but something like 80 or 90 percent of parents. Putting an expletive in the title of a show is crossing new territory, and we can't allow that to happen on our watch."

Winter's letter to companies asks bluntly: "When you advertise on television, do you want your customers to associate your product with (bleep)?"

His letter uses the expletive, not the word "bleep." Winter uses the real word 10 times in two pages.

The PTC - totally reading Playboy for the articles.

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Not that relations were awesome before, but since 9/11 it's been pretty much standard policy for America to not really give a damn how Muslims are treated. It's important, rhetorically, to completely seperate them into an "other" group, because it makes it so much easier to dislike them as a collective entity that way, and pretend there are actual, logical, non-racist arguments for banning some of them from "building a mosque at Ground Zero," also known as "building a cultural center three blocks away from where lots of people, including Muslims, were killed by lunatics who were intolerant of religious diversity."

Of course, there is no non-racist way to say that it would be "better off for everyone" if Muslims just shut up and moved their pesky little freedom of religion somewhere else, any more then there's an unbiased analysis on the benefits of segregated drinking fountains. If 9/11 has done anything in terms of racial and cultural tension, it's making blatant racism a mainstream act that no longer gets you shunned from public discourse.

There used to be organizations-leagues, if you will- devoted to stopping defamation. They appear to have dropped the ball and then upset its grave with a bulldozer.

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Lovely people.

At least, that's what we assumed was a feature of the room when this happened to us Friday morning as we were sleeping there. Well, I was sleeping there. My friend who actually booked the room got the bed. I got the couch in the living room - second tip, folks: when you go to Vegas, tip the desk guy $20 and you can often get a room that, well, has a living room - which was mere feet from the credenza with the minibar, ice bucket and of course, tempered glass countertop.

It should be repeated that this was a spontaneous explosion. We were all asleep when it happened. This isn't some kind of weird way to excuse us for doing something stupid. We're still wondering what combination of pressure, air temperature or other matter of science beyond our hungover capabilities at the time caused a countertop to, at about seven in the morning, suddenly burst into several thousand pieces of chipped glass and spread out all over the floor of the room. I work up to the sound of what I thought was the television falling off the wall.

Now, if this was a curiosity to us, it was even more of a curiosity to the entire staff of Caesar's Palace, who over the course of the next half hour ended up in our room. They appeared in hierarchal progression, like bosses in a video game. The front desk first sent, as they of course would when you called them and said part of your room exploded, the cleaning lady. We were quickly elevated to two cleaning ladies, followed by a cleaning lady who spoke English natively. This elevated to repair guy - he had a belt with things on them - who begat repair guy with radio, who used radio to summon security. Security was apparently low-tier security, as he came not with a gun but a camera to take pictures of the damage. Guns were, wisely so, deemed useless against suicide bomber tables.

Finally, we started getting the people who actually wore ties. Ties meant business, as these were the serious men who started asking the serious questions. Not to us, I mean. They were pretty much done with us at this point. No, now it was time to ask the questions of the building contractor, questions that were phrased as to be very clear about what the real issue here was but not actually addressing it. Questions like: "Has this ever happened before?" "Will this happen again?" and naturally the immediate follow up "Are these countertops in every room in this hotel?"

Somewhere after repair guy with flashlight but before first guy with tie, I got a quarter inch cut on my wrist from a shard of the glass. It wasn't a terrible cut, just the kind that bleeds a lot. So while everyone employed by the Harrah's Corporation was convening in our living room, I went to the bathroom to ruin a Caesar's Palace hand towel. What I was really scared about was that a guy with a tie was going to show up, flail wildly, and demand that I lose a day of my vacation doing something stupid like go to a hospital, and, well, no. So instead I felt the appropriate thing to do was to pour Dewar's on the wound to cauterize it and then ask for a band-aid. Oh, and of course then text my friends to tell them I did that.

And that was the second best part of his Vegas trip, he said, winking.